As the electoral battles heat up, we see more lurid headlines about undocumented immigrants being “more likely to commit crimes.”
What are the facts? Many researchers crunching the numbers have found there’s no connection between immigration and crime.
“In a recent Pew Research Center report about the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, 57% of Americans say the large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime,” CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet noted in an article posted on Feb. 27. But, she said, this idea “flies in the face of years of studies looking at what happened after immigrants came to communities across the U.S. Many researchers crunching the numbers have found there’s no connection between immigration and crime. Some have even found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S.”
Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote on March 6 that his recent research into homicides allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants in Texas “showed that illegal immigrants have lower criminal conviction and arrest rates than native‐born Americans and that legal immigrants had the lowest of all.”
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
